Quotes About Change

The greatest difficulty in antiquity with that of altering the law; among the moderns, it is that of altering the manners.

But in the course of thirty years a great change took place, and the North refused to perpetuate what had become the peculiar institution of the South, especially as it gave the South a species of aristocratic preponderance.

As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.

In America] wealth circulates inconceivable rapidity, and experience shows that it is rare to find two succeeding generations in the full enjoyment of it.

The American lives in a land of wonders, in which everything seems to be in constant flux, and every change seems to mark an advance. Hence the idea of the new is coupled in his mind with the idea of the better. Nowhere does he perceive the limits that nature may have imposed on man's efforts. In his eyes, that which does not exist is that which has not yet been attempted.

People think that the destructive theories that nowadays go by the name "socialism" are of recent origin. This is a mistake: these theories were contemporaneous with the first Economists. While they employed the all-powerful government of their dreams as an instrument to change the forms of society, socialists imagined seizing the same power to undermine its base.

Never was such a great event, with such ancient causes, so well prepared and so little foreseen.

They were prepared for everything except what actually happened.

I soon perceived that the influence of this fact

The old nobility was the most irreligious class of society before 1789, and the most pious after 1793 ...

It appears to me beyond doubt that sooner or later we shall arrive, like the Americans, at an almost complete equality of conditions.

Democracy shuts the past against the poet, but opens the future before him.

Looking back century by century to remotest Antiquity, I see nothing that resembles what I see before me.

Are ruins, then, already here?

Lorsque les Républiques américaines commenceront à dégénérer, je crois qu'on pourra aisément le reconnaître: il suffira de voir si le nombre des jugements politiques augmente.

Americans often change their laws, but the foundation of the Constitution is respected.

Having destroyed an aristocratic society, we seem ready to go on living complacently amid the rubble forever.

When once the Americans have taken up an idea, whether it be well or ill founded, nothing is more difficult than to eradicate it from their minds.

In the present age men are not very inclined to die in defence of their opinions, but they are rarely inclined to change them.

If, instead of all the diverse powers which excessively hindered or slowed down the flight of reason of the individual, democratic nations substituted the absolute power of a majority, only the character of this social ill would have been changed. Men would not have achieved the means of living independently; they would simply have lighted upon—a difficult enough task in itself—a new face of enslavement.

One epoch's popular culture is another's esoterica.

Don't ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.

So, in five seconds, he was born, he lived and he died. After thirty years of existence and six months of torture, Gully Foyle, the stereotype Common Man was no more. The key turned in the lock of his soul and the door was opened. What emerged expunged the Common Man for ever.

You can't go back and you can't catch up. Happy endings are always bittersweet.